Most people have a point where they lose their temper and this was mine. I was boiling at the treatment I had received and finally when he spit on me, It was too much and I spit back. Of course this was a foolish thing to do, since he was in the driver's seat. He barked an order in Korean and before I could defend myself, I was stripped naked by the four goons standing behind me. They rammed me down into the chair and bound me there with fine wire, until I could not move.
It is difficult to explain the feeling one has at being humiliated like this; you don't explain it by saying that you were embarrassed. But I was sure of one thing, being embarrassed was to be a minor problem for me. Soon a man came with electric wires, which were wound around tender parts of my body and 110 volts of electricity was turned on. Looking back, I can't remember the pain. It was more like some giant hand that picked me and that chair high in the air and sent us crashing to the floor. Have you ever driven through a tunnel, where at the end you could see a light? It seemed as though I was in a long, long tunnel, and somewhere in the distance I could hear someone screaming over and over, I wanted to shout: "For God's sake, shut up; you're driving me crazy!" Then suddenly, I realized the voice I heard in the distance was my own. It seemed as though this went on for hours... I'm sure It was only a short time... then merciful darkness descended on me and they hauled me back to my cell.
I woke to the sound of thunder in the room. At least I thought It was thunder. Then I realized, that somewhere in that room was a loud speaker which was turned up to full volume. Hour after hour, for maybe sixteen to eighteen hours
About the fifth day, the guards took me into the streets. I was still naked and covered with filth. I had received nothing to eat or drink - the only moisture I had been able to get was the condensation I could lick from the filthy walls of my cell. My lips had swelled, cracked and bled. My tongue had swelled like a sponge, until I could not get my lips together. In the street, they took a leather thong, like the leather lace in a man's hunting boot. Placing this on a large steel needle, they ran the thong through my right chest muscle, and wiring my thumbs behind my back, they tethered me to a pole in the courtyard and left me to the tender mercies of the children and women. The little boys had great fun using me for target practice, plastering me with rotten vegetables and horse manure. The women were the worst; they would stand about, making vulgar references to me and striking me on tender parts of my body until I thought I would faint with the pain. But worst of all were the flies - hordes of sticky, aggressive, Korean flies. (No country in the world has flies as bad as those of Korea.) They gathered around my eyes, nose and mouth, walking in and out of my open mouth. Before I could breathe, I would first have to blow the flies away. (For months afterwards, I would wake screaming in the middle of the night, feeling the flies still crawling in my mouth.)
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